CHAPTER SEVEN
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Tammy sat in her bedroom with the windows open to the late September ocean breeze, her knees clutched to her chest. The moon lit the ocean in a channel of silver.
Taking care of the animals had numbed her to her predicament for a while. She’d come upstairs and opened her tablet to research eyesight. Thirty percent of horses were myopic like Cally. Who knew? She’d have to try Gwen, just for comparison. And what about birds? Their eyesight was supposed to be phenomenal. What would it be like to see that precisely?
No, no! She couldn’t be seduced by the rush of getting a power. Her stupid power wasn’t of any use to anyone anyway. Just another secret she was burdened with, at least until she got clinically depressed or, less clinically, batty as a loon.
She felt tears fill her eyes, again. And then she felt something else.
Oh. My. God.
She could feel the Clan guy moving closer. It had been happening for a while, she realized. It had just been an itchy feeling, not specific. But suddenly, she was sure.
Wait! she wanted to yell. You weren’t supposed to be able to feel where your destined mate was until you’d, you know, done it with him. That’s what Drew said happened to her and Michael. And Maggie said the same thing about Tris. This whole thing with her and the Clan guy wasn’t following any of the rules. She’d known he was her Destiny immediately. Well, that was like Drew and Michael. But now she was feeling where he was? Even though he was really far away? She could feel that too! Maggie and Drew both said it got less intense the farther away they were from their mates, until it pretty much went away with any real distance. Of course, they also said not having the connection left them feeling bereft and hopeless. Hell, she had them beat on that score. She felt bereft and hopeless because she could feel him.
He was coming this way.
Damn. Was he bringing Clan with him? Was there going to be another attack on The Breakers? She had to warn the family.
But that way was dangerous too, because she’d have to explain how she knew.
She pushed herself out of bed, drawn to the window. Her bedroom on the second floor looked out over the ocean. The stables loomed in the darkness off to the right.
They’d know she was tied to a Clan member. Maybe they wouldn’t believe her. Or maybe they’d think she was luring them into combat with the Clan, that she’d already betrayed them for her chosen One. What to do?
She’d go ask Michael to see whether any Clan members he could identify were coming closer to The Breakers. But if Michael couldn’t what did that prove? It only meant they were cloaked. But apparently even Jason couldn’t Cloak her sense of her Destiny.
Panic started to overwhelm her. Okay. Okay. She didn’t have to tell them she knew the Clan was coming. But she had to get her family looking for an attack, just in case.
She raced to the door and stumbled down the stairs. Was anybody still up? The lights were on in the office wing. Maybe Kemble…
The conference room was empty. Kee had evidently called it a day. Scratch that—night. It was after midnight. She burst into Kemble’s office to find him hunched over his computer.
He jerked around, surprised. “Tammy, what are you still doing up?”
She stood, frozen. What to say? “Do…do you think the Clan will attack The Breakers again?” Her voice sounded squeaky and tremulous.
Kemble’s eyes got big and he started to look around as though someone else was in the room. “Calm down, Tamsen. Let me…let me get Jane.”
“I just want to know we’re protected. I mean, what if they’re on their way here right now? They could have grenades or powers we don’t know about.” She didn’t have to pretend her breathlessness. “Are you on the look-out for an attack? Are we prepared?’
Now Kemble looked a little panicky himself. But she saw him swallow. He got up and gathered her in a big hug. She was shaking in his arms. “They’re too busy for us right now.”
“What?” He wasn’t even going to say they couldn’t get in to The Breakers?
“Well, the Pentacle is coming into alignment,” Kemble said calmly, resting his chin on her head. “They’re busy preparing for whatever is going to happen then. That’s bad, of course.” He held her away and managed a rueful smile. “But I don’t think we’re top of mind.”
Kemble didn’t know what she knew. “Has Michael Found them?”
“Drew and I made him sleep, but so far, nothing.”
“When did he last look?” But she knew the answer to that. They must be Cloaked. He never would have gone to bed if he had Found them so close. And Kemble would be frantic.
Instead, he sat her down at the side chair next to his desk. “Want some tea?” He had a little brewer on a table at the opposite wall. “Chamomile won’t keep you up.”
She nodded, feeling hopeless. Her oldest brother slipped one of the little pods into the machine and punched a button. The drink maker hummed.
“I know we’re under pressure, Tammy.” Kemble looked guilty. Of course he would. He took responsibility for everything. Always had. And had always felt he wasn’t the man Daddy was. But with Daddy out of leadership commission, it was all up to Kemble. That would be a lot for anybody in the current situation. He gathered himself. “We’ll find out what’s supposed to happen at the confluence of the Pentacle. Drew is searching her visions. We’ll pull through.” He handed her the cup of steaming comfort.
Tammy was the one feeling guilty. How could she add to his burden by being hysterical She sipped her tea. “Thanks.”
“And if the Clan comes around…we’ve got a commitment for Navy SEALs to come running from the base in Seal Beach if the security guys and my systems can’t handle them.”
“A hotline phone?” she asked, mustering a smile.
“Something like that.” He shrugged. “Just don’t want to cry wolf.”
“How…how long would it take them to get here?”
“They have helicopters.” Kemble said. They both knew it might not be fast enough.
Oh dear. The Clan guy’s movement had stopped.
Slowly she turned toward the coffeemaker and the north wall of the office. He was there. Miles away. Maybe LAX? That would make sense. The movement earlier had been fast, like a plane. And now it had landed. If her guy were on an attack mission with loads of Clan baddies in tow, they’d be heading out for The Breakers, trying to take advantage of surprise.
“You okay?” Kemble asked behind her.
But she didn’t know that was what was happening. She didn’t want to cry wolf. If she felt the guy speeding closer in the next minutes—an hour max for them to get their stuff together from the airport—then it would be time to ante up what she knew and why. They’d have half an hour or so before they could get up here from the airport. That might me enough time for the SEAL backup to arrive.
“I’m fine.” She cradled her cup and went to the door. “Thanks for the tea. And the hug.”
She’d wait to see if Armageddon was at hand in her room.
*
When the helicopter set itself down on the big painted circle on top of the cement building, Thomas recognized an airport. He had experience with airports, though this one was much bigger than the ones in Athens or Las Vegas. Planes roared over the noise of the rotors. Lights split the darkness. Cars started and stopped on the street five or six stories below and on another one a level above it. People hurried everywhere. Buses puffed noxious fumes as they heaved away from the terminals. The place was alive, though it was late in the night.
He had to get out of here without rousing the suspicions of the pilots or the generals. He’d had about an hour to think about it.
So he just opened the door to the cargo area and began to hand luggage out to the men in overalls who scurried up as the blades to the craft slowed. One hopped up to help him.
“Thank you,” Thomas shouted over the noise.
“No problem. We’ll get these into the terminal for you.”
Thomas saw the generals bending to get out of the passenger side. He jumped to the ground and started taking the luggage the other man handed down, all the while scanning the vast surface of the roof. When a man started piling luggage on a big rolling cart, he joined in.
Some men went over to show the generals where to go to catch their next flights. Thomas put his head down and helped push the loaded cart over to a glass and metal box that thrust up over the flat landing pad. He recognized it: an elevator just like the one in the compound.
The generals were thanking the pilots and putting on their coats as the elevator doors closed around him, two other men in overalls, and the cart. When they reached the bottom and the doors opened, the two other men pushed the cart out.
“We can get it from here,” one said.
“Thank you,” Thomas said, saluting. He’d seen Duncan do that at the compound to indicate that he heard and understood. Thomas too stepped out of the elevator, but as they pushed the loaded cart away, he slid back into the shadows of the bottom floor of the building, behind the large flowering plants that screened it. Open on all sides, it was filled with parked cars.
He’d done it. He shivered in his denim shirt, but it wasn’t from cold.
For the last minutes of the flight, he’d been able to feel her. He turned into the building, facing south. She was that way. Far away, but there. He’d wondered how he would find her.
Now he knew.
All he had to do was follow his sense of her to get there. He didn’t know how he knew where she was. He’d never known that about anybody else—not that he remembered anyway. He’d never heard of anyone else who knew exactly where another person was without seeing or hearing them. All he knew was he needed to get to her and that she had somehow wormed her way inside him.
But getting to her was the problem. Morgan had used money for transportation and food on their trip from Mt. Athos. He didn’t have any money. He dared not advertise his presence by asking someone with a car to help. Any one of them might know Morgan and call her when they saw him. He couldn’t go back to Morgan without Tammy.
Had Morgan missed him yet? He thought not. She would expect him to be sleeping. If she checked on him, she would see the lump in the bed in the dark of his room. He had the night to find Tammy. Would Morgan think he had escaped into the desert? He hoped so. That would give him even more time while she looked. But she might realize he had used the helicopter. She might come looking for him if he was important to her purpose.
He started walking through the sterile concrete, filled with gleaming vehicles in every color and smelling of petrol. He’d better put some distance between himself and the landing spot. But he couldn’t just show up at Tammy’s house in the middle of the night. He couldn’t break her out of her prison, not alone against the Tremaine clan, not knowing the layout or the defenses. He needed Tammy to help him. She knew those things. So he had to see her alone and convince her to come with him then they would escape together. But how, if she was asleep in her house/prison? Perhaps she was allowed outside for exercise. He must wait for daylight, dangerous as that was, until she was separate from her family and tell her she was wrong to be Morgan’s enemy. Then she’d come back with him and Morgan would be pleased.
*
Tammy stood like a statue in her room. The tea was cold. She opened the north window so she could see the lace necklace of lights lining the bay up the coast. You could see all the way to Malibu from here. And there, in the middle of the great Santa Monica Bay, was the airport, seventeen miles away. Only one or two planes hung in the air waiting for approach this late.
He was moving east. Very slowly. It couldn’t be a traffic jam this late. He must be…walking? Why would he be walking? If he were with the Clan, they’d have cars or SUVs.
But he was walking.
She blinked as it hit her. No car? That meant he was alone. She sucked in a big breath and let it out. She was relieved, of course. No Clan attack imminent. But a thousand other thoughts cascaded through her head. Why was he alone? And the answer to that was frightening. If she had fixed on him, if he was her Destiny, then…had he fixed on her? Was he coming for her?
And what did that mean? Had he left the Clan? Could you leave the Clan? Did he need refuge? The Tremaines could take him in.
But should they? What if he was a spy for Morgan?
What if he wasn’t? What if he was her chance to have what her siblings had, the Parents?
And where did all this leave her? What should she do?
She should tell Kemble and they could go pick him up. Ugh. She might be putting her family in danger. Or if he was trying to escape Morgan, and they took him in, her family would…be her family. They’d grill him about the Clan, and what was going to happen when the Pentacle formed.
Which could be good. They needed to know that. If Kemble and Michael didn’t go all CIA on him. They might be…over-zealous. Maybe Guantanamo over-zealous? Bad.
And then they’d all want to know how Tammy knew about him, and why he’d come here. Everyone would be appalled that she’d bonded with someone from the Clan. They wouldn’t trust him. They wouldn’t trust her anymore. The baby of the family had made a horrible mistake somehow by becoming bonded with their enemy.
And rightly so.
He might be Clan through and through, and then they’d have to…what? Imprison him? Use him as bait for Morgan, or leverage? If Morgan cared about him, taking him in might be the one sure way to bring the Clan down on The Breakers again.
She felt him turn south, toward the Breakers. It was true. He was coming for her. Her thoughts and emotions were in such a whirl she felt dizzy, though she was standing like a statue.
And then it all came clear.
It felt really rather miraculous. This was up to her. She had to find out whether he was still Clan, whether there was any hope for them to find together what the rest of her family had. And she couldn’t put her family in danger. She’d have to meet him. Then she’d know what to do.
If he turned out to be some hardened bad guy you could never trust, if she got even a sniff of him trying to bring the Clan down on The Breakers, then she’d let Michael and Kemble have at him to find out what he knew and never reveal he was her life partner.
And she’d live with the consequences for the rest of her days.
Wait, though. If she found out what he knew, she might just save the day. Tammy, the baby who couldn’t be trusted to do anything for herself, who nobody ever counted on to help the family, might just find a way to save them all. It seemed so right. Time for baby bird to fly and fly strong. She could do this, and if she didn’t try she’d be stuck in amber here at The Breakers forever, always the baby, always protected, never her own woman.
She didn’t even have to worry about finding him. He was going to find her.
Now, where to meet him? She couldn’t just go to the front gate. There were cameras everywhere.
She trembled. Would her plan break down so soon? But no! In the corner of the security fence closest to the beach, that’s where she’d meet him. There was a camera of course. Just over the bench. It pointed out of the compound and swept from side to side. But if you waited until it was facing away and came in right under it, it couldn’t see you. It didn’t sweep inside the fence, since ostensibly there was no danger from that point. She liked that spot. It had a good view of the cliffs, north, and the line of the bay. She often walked out there when she wanted privacy. That was hard to come by at The Breakers. She’d even taken an old Adirondack chair out there to watch the sunsets alone. The security guys were used to seeing her make her way out there.
And anyone on the other side of the fence, if they came in close while the camera was making its swing…they wouldn’t be seen either. She’d have the protection of a barrier, though it was only an electrified chain link fence. He could just pull out a gun and shoot her. She was taking a risk. But what choice did she have?
*
Thomas was exhausted. The tension of escaping, the fire, all seemed to have worn him out. He must have his wits about him when he met Tammy. So he should find a place to wait until Tammy would be awake. It must be a place where Morgan wouldn’t think to look for him if they realized he had gone. He made his way out of the airport. It had too many people who might be from Morgan. He passed through a forest of giant colored tubes perhaps a hundred feet high. He blinked in wonder when they morphed into new colors. Magenta turned to bright green and then some pillars turned to blue and some yellow. They were as flamboyant as the castles and gold pyramids of Las Vegas. Cars whizzed by even in the middle of the night. He turned south when he came to a road that went that way. Might as well be getting toward his destination as he looked for refuge. He walked through a long tunnel. It made the sound of the cars into a roar.
On the other side a roadway crossed above the street. A wide field of tall grasses and flowering bushes lined the car path that went up to the road. There was a small trail through the foliage, and in the distance, he saw…were those people underneath the car ramp? He peered through the darkness. Makeshift tents backed up against the concrete support wall for the roadway. He took a breath. These people were living simply in the midst of all this richness. Perhaps they were monks, rejecting excess, like Brother Theodosius and the others.
He pushed through the foliage on the narrow trail. The ascetics were very poor, of course. Their tents were ragged, some hardly more than a canvas canopy tied to rude stakes. Several wheeled metal carts were piled with old clothing, bags made of paper and a white, shiny, supple material he didn’t know. He could make out perhaps fifteen people somewhere in the shadows and a couple of dogs. Most were sleeping, with dirty blankets pulled up over their heads. But two were sitting, smoking small white sticks of rolled leaves. He’d seen people in Greece doing that. They passed a bottle around. The two men had tangled hair and dirty faces. That was puzzling. The monks at Mt. Athos had been very clean.
“What you lookin’ at?” one of them rasped.
“I…I wondered if I could sleep here.” Thomas knew he’d been rude to stare.
“Free country,” the other one mumbled. Was that permission?
Thomas sat, cross-legged across from them on the dirt. The men looked him over with avaricious eyes. He cleared his throat, uncomfortable.
“You got any booze? Just to be friendly like?” That one’s longer hair was tangled into long rolls almost like braids.
“What is ‘booze’?”
The man waved the bottle. It sloshed. “Alcohol. Whiskey. Hooch.”
Thomas shook his head. “No. I’m sorry. If I had any, I would give it to you.” He suddenly didn’t think these men were ascetics practicing simplicity for their faith.
“Well, don’t think you’re gonna git some of ours,” the man snarled.
“I only want a place to sleep.”
“He’s gonna wait until we pass out and steal our stuff.”
“No, no!” Thomas held up his hands. “Just sleep. I’ll go in the morning.”
But they didn’t seem to be listening. “Well, he’s not gonna get our booze.”
“Right about that.” The one with the long tangled rolls of hair stubbed out the ember of his rolled leaves and carefully saved the remains by putting them in the pocket of his dirty coat. He upended the bottle. His Adam’s apple moved in his throat as he gulped it down. Then he handed it to his anxious friend who did the same.
“You stay awake and watch him,” the one with tangled curls said, hiccuping. He pulled a baseball bat from under the blankets behind him. “He makes a move for our stuff, brain him.”
Thomas had a bad feeling about this. They might beat him to death in his sleep. How could he gain their trust? Should he move on? To where? “I don’t want your stuff,” he told them. “Here.” He took off his baseball cap. “You can have this. It’s all I have to give you. Just let me sleep here tonight.”
The one with the long hair rolls snatched his cap. “Well, well. Could be useful, this hat.”
“That ain’t all you got, boy. How ’bout that shirt?” the other asked. His voice was slurred.
“That you can have in the morning. After you’ve let me sleep here without beating me to death.” But of course there was nothing to prevent them from beating him to death and taking all his clothes and his boots. They were both swaying now, though, their eyes heavy-lidded. Even as he watched, the man with the short tangled curls slumped to the side. He’d passed out. The man to whom Thomas had given his cap wasn’t far behind. His protection would be that they were physically unable to make good on any threat.
“Sure. In th’ mornin’.” The man with the tangled braids waved a vague hand and lay down on his bedroll, eyes closing.
Thomas scooted over to the other side of the clearing. Overhead the cars roaring by on the road grew occasional. He huddled in his shirt, clutching his arms around his body. It wasn’t really cold here, but there was a nip in the air. At least he wasn’t naked, as he had been in the hut on Mt. Athos. But there he had known his universe through and through. Here, he felt adrift in a world he couldn’t understand.
The only thing he knew was that he must reach Tammy Tremaine. He’d find a way to see her, convince her to come with him. He pushed down his doubts about Morgan’s purpose when they started to raise their ugly heads. Morgan knew about the world and Thomas didn’t. Who was he to judge her? And without her purpose for him, what purpose did he have? It would be all right once he got Tammy involved in that purpose. He was sure of that.
Besides, he’d see her again. That excited him.
But now he had to sleep. The two men’s loud snores had joined those of the others under the ramp. He lay on his side and closed his eyes. He needed his strength. Tomorrow, he would find Tammy.